09/23/2019
Author Douglas Murray has just published a new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, which analyses the increasingly irrational behavior of humans in groups.
His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe, was excellent, and you can read my review in The Social Contract journal, Suicide by Immigration — Has Europe given up on Itself?.
Murray’s new book appears to be similarly astute, and he appeared recently for an interview with Tucker Carlson to sort through the current craziness in society.
Too bad the discussion wasn’t longer. A more in-depth exchange between these two would be worthwhile to say the least.
Audio version:MP3.
TUCKER CARLSON: Issues like wearing blackface decades ago are big news, in part because the entire western world has become obsessed with identity politics.
Top Democrats in particular are going on, we could give you a thousand examples. We just picked a couple out of the bin.
During a recent rally in New York City, Senator Elizabeth Warren cast her frontrunner campaign as one that excludes men. Listen to this:
SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: I am especially glad to be here in Washington Square Park. I wanted to give this speech right here, and not because of the arch behind me, or the president that this square is named for. Nope. We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.
CARLSON: Yes, because you don’t have fathers or anything because biology is not real. Georgia conspiracy theorist, meanwhile, and inevitable vice presidential nominee Stacey Abrams is explicit about how much she loves identity politics. Watch this:
FORMER GEORGIA LEGISLATOR STACEY ABRAMS: I lean in to identity politics. In fact, I believe in identity politics. And I believe identity politics are the only politics that win. And I don’t think you should fight me for that because you have an identity too.
CARLSON: So what’s driving this new obsession with identity politics? And is there any way out of it, this vortex? No one has thought more deeply about this than Douglas Murray. He is the author of a book that you have got to read. It’s called, “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.” It just came out. I was up late reading it last night and it is absolutely fantastic. Douglas Murray joins us tonight. Douglas, thanks so much for coming on.
AUTHOR DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s a real pleasure, Tucker.
CARLSON: The identity politics pushes so many emotional buttons in people that it’s very hard to step back far enough as you have in this book, to consider what it means. What’s the point of this? Why are they doing this? Why are they doing it?
MURRAY: Well, there are several reasons. There are different groups of people who are responsible. There is one group who are just pushing this because this is naked politics and this — I take each of these issues in “The Madness of Crowds” one by one.
I do gay, women, race and trans; and in each of these ones, you see the naked root politics at some point. For instance, you get the thing where there are there are gay people who are conservative and therefore denounced by the gay press is no longer gay. I, by the way, had that again this week in America.
Then you get women who have the wrong politics, i.e. conservative and they’ve said to no longer be feminists. You have, you have black Americans who have conservative politics, and they are denounced as no longer black, and this keeps happening.
And at those points you see, that’s just naked politicking. You are using identity groups to batter down a political point, and that’s undoubtedly the case of a lot of people. There are other things going on here, too.
One of them, I show in the book, is just a continuation of an old Marxist idea. You know, there were from the 70s and 80s onwards, a group of people, Marxists and post-Marxists for whom the working class have let them down. You know, the working class never did come up with a revolution in America that they wanted.
CARLSON: No, that’s true.
MURRAY: And they wanted to get these new groups as they saw them, identity groups, ethnic identity groups, racial identity groups, and minority sexual identity groups. They wanted these people to all be brought together to further and actually, this time bring about the revolution that the working class that proved such a loser for them on.
And so several things, but those two, I think are the most pernicious and the problem I have with this, I’ll just say, is that a lot of young people now are growing up in America, are being lied to that this is actually about virtue, that this is actually how they should be their lives, that they should spend their lives pursuing this zero sum game, this appalling zero sum game.
CARLSON: That’s right.
MURRAY: You know, gays against the straights, women against men, all ethnic groups against each other. Trans against absolutely everybody. And this is just a terrible way not just to do politics, but a horrible way to spend your life.
And we have to make sure that the next generation of young Americans that are being wooed into this are wooed out of it.
CARLSON: It does seem like an inexorable recipe for division. I mean, at its core, this politics is telling you to hate people on the basis of qualities they can’t control. I mean, how is that resolved? How can you fix that? I mean, doesn’t that always end up in the worst possible place?
MURRAY: We have to point out that the game they’re inviting us all to play cannot be won.
Nor this cannot be played — it specifically cannot be won. For instance, they do this privilege game, you know, people suffer from privilege, and therefore then — there is an example in Britain earlier this week with The Guardian, the main left wing newspaper, said that David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, may have experienced pain in his life, like the loss of his eldest son, the death of his eldest son, but it was only privileged pain he’d ever felt.
CARLSON: Oh my gosh. I can’t imagine that. That’s disgusting.
MURRAY: You’re trying to make a political point about privilege in order to bring some people down. And you decide, yes, well, he was one of the lucky ones, he lost his eldest son, because he is rich.
You know, I mean, this is the disgusting anti-human position that people get to if they go down this route. You know, they end up being profoundly anti-human. And, you know, I just think that again, we have to show people that these are not games that can be played or won.
You can never work out where exactly somebody’s privilege is. You know, Justin Trudeau is an incredibly privileged person in all sorts of ways.
CARLSON: I’ve noticed that.
MURRAY: You know, all of these people are playing this in American politics.
Now, Elizabeth Warren is by any stretch of imagination, unbelievably privileged person.
CARLSON: I know, but she is lecturing you on your privilege. Douglas Murray, come back. I hope you will join us once more. The Madness of Crowds — I recommend this book personally. It’s fantastic. Congratulations on that. Thank you for coming.
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